Big Improvement on Last Year’s Record : Buses Get Passing Grade as School Starts

Given last year’s debacle, Pamela Ibarra was stunned when a San Diego city school bus pulled up outside her home Sunday to practice taking her wheelchair-bound son aboard for the next day’s trip to Schweitzer elementary school.

“I had the bus driver drop by yesterday for a dry run and introduce himself,” she said Monday. “He checked my son’s chair to familiarize himself with it. He was very polite, very courteous.”

Despite some serious first-day delays, Ibarra’s driver and more than 500 others were equally prompt when the school year began Monday, generally improving on the dismal performance by the district’s buses last year, when thousands of children were stranded on corners or arrived hours late for school.

The disaster--caused by the failure of a new $1.1-million computerized bus-routing program--plagued students and school officials for most of last year, enraging parents who were forced to find alternative ways of getting their children to school and frustrating administrators who attempted to solve a string of problems.

Though there were at least a few children who arrived at school three hours late Monday, transportation officials reported only 80 glitches among more than 1,300 bus trips during the morning run.

Afternoon bus runs were less successful, with 150 delays among the 1,500 trips made by district’s drivers, said Supt. Thomas Payzant. A handful of the delays again stretched to three hours, he said.

Two serious problems developed when radio communications at one of the district’s major bus contractors failed during the mid-afternoon bus runs, and computer capabilities were lost when a telephone line went out, Payzant said.

“It appears we have met our expectations of delivering 90% of the children on time, as scheduled the first day of school,” said R. Dan Stephens, director of transportation services for the San Diego Unified School District. “The task ahead is to provide service to that other 10% as soon as possible.”

The buses stranded about 150 of the approximately 25,000 students they transported to city schools Monday morning and brought an additional 650 to their schools 15 minutes to three hours late, Stephens said.

The city students were part of an estimated 337,387 students returning Monday to 467 schools countywide, including five new ones. They were greeted by nearly 15,000 teachers, 800 more than last year, according to the county Office of Education.

In the San Diego city schools, opening-day enrollment was 106,505, up from 105,731 last year, according to a spokesman. Enrollment stabilized at 113,000 in the district last year and is expected to climb slightly this year.

Stephens said his major concern was over the 26 buses that brought students to school more than 50 minutes late Monday morning. Several of the longest delays were registered by the private contractors hired by the district to transport students to integration or special education programs.

“Anything over 50 minutes I’m unhappy about,” he said. “Fifty minutes is about a class period. On the first day of school, I don’t think we should be that late.”

Some of his colleagues were more charitable. “It was the quietest, most tranquil day we’ve had in years,” said Jodie Bruhn, who was starting her first year as principal at Bell Junior High School after transferring from Marston Middle School. “Compared to last year, there’s no comparison. Accolades to those people in transportation.”

Parents of disabled students like Ibarra were especially inconvenienced by the delays last year because of the complications in operating the door-to-door service needed for about 3,000 special-education students. Ibarra’s 5-year-old son, Jacob, was routinely late for preschool at Schweitzer or had no bus service through April, she said. In frustration, Ibarra often took him to school herself, so that he would not miss his 9 a.m. physical therapy sessions.

“There were mornings, honestly, that I cried,” she said.

But Monday, the driver arrived on time and helped settle Jacob’s nerves about the new year. “He greeted my son by his first name, and talked to him, and talked about one of the other boys on the bus. He just made him feel at home,” she said.

At Schweitzer, where 133 disabled students are enrolled, 95% arrived within 10 or 15 minutes of their target times Monday, Principal Robert Altman said. On opening day last year, only seven students made it to school on the buses. The next day, there were only five.

“It’s a heck of a lot better,” Altman said. “The kids are here this year. They weren’t last year.”

Some of the delays Monday were quite lengthy. At Lowell Elementary School in Logan Heights, only two of 10 buses arrived on time, and some did not arrive until 10 a.m., a secretary said. On two runs to Lowell, some children were 180 minutes late.

There were delays of 150 minutes at the O’Farrell School of Creative and Performing Arts and University City High School; 130 minutes at Fulton elementary school, and 120 minutes at Jerabek Elementary School and Lincoln and Morse high schools. Other bus runs were an hour or more behind.

At least four drivers simply failed to show up, forcing dispatchers to send substitutes. Lengthy delays were caused by several accidents involving the buses, all of them minor.

But by 7:30 a.m., staffers scurrying at one of two bus dispatching headquarters knew that their silent telephones were signaling the start of a good day almost free of irate parents and school administrators.

“There are phones that are not ringing right now and that’s an incredible feat,” said Barret Westover, a school bus scheduler. “Last year, every phone was ringing or on hold, and people were running wild. We were in a heavy crisis mode.

“Last year, when (my children) didn’t get picked up, they couldn’t get through to tell me, so it was 11 a.m. before I knew anything,” she said. “Every line was busy--even the emergency lines, the private lines I gave them to get through.”

Monday’s effort was the result of a massive overhaul of the transportation system by school officials. Gone is the computerized system designed by Ecotran Systems Inc. of Cleveland, which overloaded buses and drove drivers wild by routing them down streets that ended in impassable canyons.

In its place is the old manual system: tens of thousands of color-coded pins in huge maps, connected by colored yarn. There is a pin for every stop, and a pin for every student, color-coded by race.

The district has rechecked information on its 3,000 special-education students at least five times, and has conducted practice runs of every route. The 20,000 students riding the buses under district integration programs were checked at least twice.

Approximately 3,000 students who failed to enroll in the integration programs before deadlines in June and July were without scheduled service Monday, Stephens said. They must wait until later this month to be assigned bus routes and stops, but were allowed to ride buses Monday if space was available.

As late as Saturday, the system was 18 buses short of the number needed to carry special-education students. But after two days of negotiations, Stephens agreed to lease the buses from Taylor Bus Service, a major contractor that had been rejected by the school board earlier this year because it could not provide adequate liability insurance. Ironically, action in Taylor’s lawsuits against the district over that issue begins today.

Stephens said that Taylor agreed to put up adequate liability insurance for the duration of a short-term contract approved by school district attorney Jose Gonzalez.